(RealClear Investigations)—Though even Donald Trump’s harshest critics now concede he may not be the “Russian agent” they once speculated he was, the consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he’s a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery.
This persistent belief springs from a January 2017 U.S. intelligence document crafted by the Obama administration, which classified the sourcing behind it at the highest levels.
Known as an intelligence community assessment (ICA) and titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” its unclassified finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win has gone largely unquestioned by the Washington media and by Democrats and Republicans alike. They’ve accepted its conclusion that Putin abetted Trump as incontrovertible fact, and many suspect he continues to cast a spell over the now-reelected president.
Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 loss on Putin. She’s asserted, “There’s no doubt in my mind [that Putin] wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,” echoing the ICA’s judgments, which she and other leading Democrats continue to cite to explain Trump’s ascendency.
But former intelligence czar John Ratcliffe has seen the evidence underlying the ICA, and is not convinced it supports that conclusion. His skepticism, reported here for the first time, appears in written testimony he submitted to the Senate in advance of his confirmation hearing for CIA director.
Ratcliffe was confirmed last Thursday as Trump’s nod for the top Langley job.
In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by RealClearInvestigations, Senate Democrats asked Ratcliffe, “Do you agree with the ICA’s judgments,” specifically that “Putin’s goals in influencing the 2016 presidential election included ‘denigrat[ing] Secretary Clinton, and harm[ing] her electability and potential presidency’ ”?
They also asked Ratcliffe if he concurred with the ICA’s finding that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Ratcliffe answered that after reviewing the ICA’s underlying intel, including sources and methods, he could only agree that “Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and sow division among the American people,” according to page 38 of the document.
He noted that “Russian social media campaigns included efforts to both support and criticize candidate Trump as well as candidate Clinton, further suggesting an overarching goal of promoting discord.” In other words, he saw no concrete evidence to support a plot by Putin to side with Trump against Clinton.
In the questionnaire, Ratcliffe also pointed out that Moscow has “long used” propaganda, disinformation, and cyberattacks to target not only U.S. elections but also those in other Western democracies, implying its 2016 influence operation was nothing new.
Ratcliffe saw for himself the underlying evidence while acting as Trump’s director of the Office of National Intelligence.
In 2020, he discovered a CIA document from 2016 stating that Clinton, in July of that year, had approved “a plan” by her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to create a scandal tying Trump to Putin and the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The CIA material seemed to contradict the findings of the ICA, prepared and widely disseminated just months later by his predecessor John Brennan, who, as Barack Obama’s CIA director, was tasked after Trump’s surprise victory to assess Russia’s role in the election.
Raising more alarms, Brennan had attached as an annex to the ICA false rumors about Trump and Putin conspiring during the election, plucked from a political dossier underwritten by the Clinton campaign.
Suspicious, Ratcliffe decided to look deeper into how the ICA was developed, according to his Senate confirmation testimony.
“I requested a briefing from the CIA from some members of the team that were involved in that,” he said.
After interviewing CIA analysts who helped draft the ICA and examining the underlying intelligence, he reached different conclusions. Ratcliffe’s review found the evidence was much weaker than Brennan had claimed and did not support his explosive judgments about Putin and Trump.
This flies in the face of what the public has been told about one of the most consequential pieces of intelligence in modern American history.
By painting Trump as a Trojan Horse for Putin, the ICA triggered years-long investigations by a special counsel and by both the Senate and House intelligence committees. It also provided the foundation for thousands of Russiagate articles questioning the patriotism, credibility, and legitimacy of the Trump presidency, including stories that won a Pulitzer Prize for both the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In her witness testimony, Trump aide Hope Hicks told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the ICA report was viewed internally as the then-president’s “Achilles’ heel” because even if the Russiagate “collusion” scandal were a hoax, “people would think Russia helped him win, taking away from what he had accomplished.”
Aside from Ratcliffe’s startling new disclosure, the national media have ignored several red flags about the ICA’s spycraft and even gone along with demonstrably false spin about its veracity and dependability. For example:
- Despite widespread press accounts that the report reflected the consensus view of “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies,” it was rushed out in just a few weeks by a tightly controlled group of CIA analysts led by Brennan, who only consulted with the FBI and National Security Agency.
- Yet even the NSA, which intercepts signals intel from Moscow and monitors the communications of Russian officials, dissented from the key judgment that Putin plotted to install Trump as president. And Brennan had to convince a highly skeptical FBI Director James Comey to join that judgment.
- Two agencies specializing in Russian intelligence – the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency – were never consulted.
- Brennan dismissed input from experts from the CIA’s own Russia House, a unit within Langley officially called the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia that for decades had been locked in battle with Russian intelligence. When two senior managers from Russia House visited Brennan in his office to tell him they agreed with the NSA, the then-CIA director overruled them, arguing that they were not privy to all the intelligence that he had seen.
- In another significant departure from previous intelligence assessments, the ICA did not attach an annex with dissenting views.
- It did, however, attach material from a political campaign dossier – a first – which happened to support Brennan’s findings that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Clinton and electing Trump. A summary of the Clinton-paid, so-called Steele dossier was included as a two-page annex.
The report of Special Counsel John Durham on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe would later shred every allegation from the dossier, one by one, using subpoenaed emails, texts, and phone records to prove they were all simply made up by Clinton advisers and paid opposition researchers. None of the information actually came from Kremlin sources, yet Brennan still included it as part of the ICA, not knowing that Clinton’s secret role in it would be uncovered years later. At the time, the dossier was deceptively referred to as “Crown material” since it was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
- The assessment suddenly changed after Trump upset Clinton. Before the election, the intelligence community agreed Russia was merely meddling in the election to create chaos and wasn’t siding with either candidate. But after Trump won, new intelligence emerged claiming Trump was personally aided by Putin, which provided a convenient excuse to explain Clinton’s stunning defeat. It also helped Obama, who endorsed Clinton, to save face after voters effectively repudiated his agenda. He’d assured them Clinton would continue his policies. Again, it was Obama who ordered the hastily drafted assessment.
- And Obama timed the release of the unclassified version of the ICA just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, knocking his presidency off balance before it could even get started.
Brennan has insisted the ICA didn’t rely on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump dossier and that his team obtained separate Russian intelligence that was highly classified and could not be shared publicly.
It wouldn’t be the first time Brennan, a Democrat who openly supported Clinton and previously worked in the White House with Obama, has played politics with U.S. intelligence.
Trump last week stripped Brennan of his top-secret security clearance, arguing he signed an intelligence community letter just weeks before the 2020 election falsely claiming that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by the New York Post appeared to be Russian disinformation. On MSNBC, Brennan dismissed Trump’s order as part of “his effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately.”
It’s not clear if Ratcliffe plans to declassify the evidence behind the ICA or his review of it. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. He said he has not yet briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about his findings.
But he also testified that what he learned about the ICA’s shoddy spycraft “influence[d]” his move to declassify and release the Brennan memo about Clinton’s plan to stir up a Russia scandal against Trump to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020.
Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who drafted intelligence assessments and Presidential Daily Briefings, said he hopes Ratcliffe issues a report on his own findings so the public can see how the Obama administration “cooked up” the anti-Trump intelligence judgments in the assessment.
“There should be an unclassified report on how the ICA was drafted, who drafted it, and objections by certain IC agencies and CIA officers that were excluded,” Fleitz said in an RCI interview.
Ratcliffe’s revelation undercuts the prevailing narrative that Putin has been meddling in U.S. elections to help Trump and to shape U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it pertains to the war in Ukraine. The Washington press corps, which essentially has staked its reputation on this narrative, continues to beat the drums.
The Atlantic, for instance, ran an article this month – and before Ratcliffe’s confirmation hearings – confidently assuming that even Trump’s “partisan” pick for the CIA would have to go along with the “unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016.”
“Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win,” wrote Atlantic staffer Shane Smith, who previously covered Russiagate for the Washington Post. “But his silence is telling.”
Of course, the new CIA director has since broken his silence and revealed information that is inconvenient for many in the media who still hold fast to the Trump-Russia storyline. Things could get more inconvenient as Obama-era intelligence is finally declassified.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
In his book “The Nation Will Follow”, Colonel (Retired) John Mills, noted that he was tasked with analyzing an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) document. This document purported to be proof that Donald J Trump was a Russian asset. The goal of this document was to delay or cancel the inauguration of Donald J Trump in 2017. Colonel Mills professionally analyzed the document and found it to be lacking of any evidence to support that claim and therefore did not concur. After forwarding his analysis, which was disregarded, Colonel Mills was informed by his superior that Director Comey and Director Brennan were personally, “hands on the keyboard”, rewriting the assessment and executive summary. Colonel Mills viewed this as a major red flag since Directors have staff to write memos and action reports and never personally partake in their writing.